Education

More Tests! More often!

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007 Heard the one about how the government are going to scrap SATs? Alan Johnson (Secretary of State for Education) and Ken Boston (Head of QCA) have been spinning this line since the turn of the year and the publication of a DfES document, ‘Making Good Progress’. This outlines the plans for a new assessment system. Ending SATs is dangled as a possibility, but in their place will come more tests, more often, along with payment by results. The government want students to ‘ascend’ two NC levels per Key Stage. To ensure teachers are pushing...

NUT Conference - Year long dispute ends in success

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007 Teachers at Colonel Frank Seely, following more than a year of campaigning and action by the NUT, have finally got their just desserts. Management at the school were first pressured into ACAS and then, for the first time since the dispute began over a year ago, forced into real negotiations with a positive outcome. Faced with significant pay cuts NUT members at the school, many not losing any money at all, stood shoulder to shoulder in the interests of those who were to lose the most. Despite long periods where it seemed that all...

Intensifying Support Programme (ISP) means more work with no support!

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007 Since the successful national ballot on the NUT’s guidelines on workload we have heard very little about the issue as a continuing campaign and yet it must have been clear to all involved that just voting to support guidelines wasn’t going to reduce workload. We hear from our national executive members that the action committee is waiting with some eagerness for the first requests from schools for permission to take action against aspects of workload. This in itself indicates that ballot requests will be looked on sympathetically and...

NUT - No Deals with Brown! For a fighting union, not a bosses union

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007 Those of you who have not been to NUT Annual Conference for a few years may find the experience a very odd one. Internal unity in the NUT is at an all-time peak and there are few parts of the agenda where fierce division and debate can be expected. Some of this is for healthy reasons. The NUT has remained outside the government’s social partnership since the national Workload Agreement was adopted by the other teacher and support staff unions in 2003. Last year the group which came up with TLRs (RIG) agreed new performance management...

Victory at Central Foundation Girls’ School

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007 Support Staff at Central Foundation Girls’ School in East London won a dispute over redundancies just before the Easter holidays began. Last September the new Headteacher, who used incidentally to be an STA member of the NUT, announced an intention to restructure the admin department and that this would be likely to lead to redundancies. 11 admin workers were to lose their job and be made to reapply for another. Unison members asked the head for redundancy-avoiding measures such as direct assimilation. We were told no even before the...

NUT - National action on pay, wordload and PRP

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin, April 2007 After John Illingworth’s powerful appeal last year for the Union to take action to relieve workload-induced teacher stress you would have thought that even our lethargic, sleep-walking executive majority would have been stung into action. Yet just one year on and the idea of national action to protect members from excessive workload has been all but abandoned. Instead we have new workload guidelines which can only be implemented with any certainty if individual school memberships demand action. So far the demand has been...

State bans and school uniform

The Guardian recently published an edited version of a letter from a number of Socialist Teachers’ Association activists. They had responded to new advice issued by the DfES about school uniform. This advice, which is available to read and respond to on the DfES website, draws partly on the decision in March 2006 by the Lords of Appeal to overturn an earlier decision in the legal dispute between Shabina Begum and her school (over whether or not she could wear the jilbab, a long gown). Briefly, the Lords of Appeal decided that the right to hold a religious belief was absolute, but the right to...

New Labour and New NUT

By Liam Conway On Thursday 22 June the Labour Party unveiled its a policy document on education: Diversity and Excellence. The report recommends the preservation of grant maintained schools (renaming them “foundation” schools), thus perpetuating the two tier-system of education the Tories introduced with their education reforms. The same document says does not recommend any increase in funds for education. This is, as one old-style Labourite, Roy Hattersley, has said, nothing short of a “repudiation of the principle of comprehensive education”. (See next page). More cause for dismay in the...

Stop the repression in Oaxaca

The struggle in Oaxaca was one of high points of workers struggle anywhere in the world last year. Now the movement of teachers and others in APPO is facing savage repression. We need to tell the story of the Oaxacan commune and make practical solidarity with workers under attack. (For an eyewitness...

Education, education, alienation

By David Broder The demand for free education is often linked to the assertion that “education is a right, not a privilege”. The right of access to education for all represents a great social conquest for the working-class, a gain perhaps even akin to healthcare. That right must be defended. But it would be short-sighted to think that the education system represented everything we want, or was not in its own way alienating, a weapon in the armoury of bourgeois ideology designed to serve the needs of capital. Marxists oppose the division of intellectual and manual labour inherent in bourgeois...

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